Developing a Training Package for Link Workers in Wales using a Realist Approach.

Many people in Wales aren’t able to get help when they have longer term health problems, or issues with their well-being. Social prescribing is a service where these people can have a conversation with a person known as a link worker. During this conversation, the link work finds out more about the person, and can connect them up with activities or services within their own community that can help them.

In Wales, lots of these services are ran by voluntary organisations. The link worker job is very complicated, and at the moment there isn’t any training for those who are doing it in Wales.

Within this project, the student will first look at all the publications, documents, websites and other sources that provide information about training for link workers. Doing this will help them to come up with some idea about what sorts of approaches to training might work best. 

The student will then speak to people who are link workers and going to be doing a social prescribing training course from England, their managers and social prescribing commissioners. They will ask them about their experiences and tell them about the things they found out when they looked at the publications. This will allow them to develop a good understanding of the type of training that link workers need.

Finally, they will use all the information they have found to make a new link worker training package.

At the end of the PhD, the student will run a series of workshop with link workers, their managers, commissioners and people who use social prescribing services, to check that the training package is suitable and add detail about the delivery of the package. The training package will then be shared across Wales.